Re: [admin-discuss] Proposed ietf.org email address policy

[John Levine <[e-mail]>]

It appears that IETF Chair  <[e-mail]> said:
>* the IESG must be consulted before any new email addresses under
>  ietf.org are created and will have the sole responsibility for
>  approving and managing addresses under ietf.org
>
>* new individual email addresses for LLC personnel will be allocated
>  under a new staff.ietf.org subdomain, with the LLC being solely
>  responsible for the approval and management of those addresses

I understand the goal here is to make it possible to make [e-mail]
be a mailing list, and [e-mail] an unrelated person.  That is
a terrible idea.  I can assure you that if you do that, bob the mailing
list will get an endless stream of mail intended for bob the person, and
there is no way to stop it.

I happen to have a Gmail address which is my first and last names. It
gets lots and lots of mail intended for people with names similar to
mine who think that my address is their address. Or maybe they know
their address, it's [e-mail] or
[e-mail], but whatever it is, people don't hear the
extra part and I get the mail. I tell them it's wrong, they apologize,
and more often than not the mail continues. (There is a pharmacist in
Paris who has given me a standing invitation to drop by the shop due
to all the wrong mail he and his friends and the French government
have sent me.)

For the same reason, no matter how clearly [e-mail] tells
people his address, they will send mail to [e-mail].  He will tell
them again, they'll say, oh, right, sorry, and they will send more mail
to [e-mail].

There are about 8 billion seven-character strings we can use as list names,
or 50 billion with embedded digits.  When we're setting up a new list or WG,
we already have to check that it doesn't collide with any of the existing
addresses, and I don't understand why a few more addresses for the collision
check is a problem, or that we will be unable to find a suitable address
among the billions of available strings.

But I am quite sure that moving some of the addresses into a subdomain
will create needless pain because you just can't force people to
remember that. So let's not try.

R's,
John